I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
There’s plenty of room on the LILO
What are LLMs good for? Everything, if you believe marketing announcements and press releases. Very little, if you believe the most sceptical of sceptics. It sometimes seems that we are still waiting for the crowning innovation, the killer app that will secure the place of LLMs in our enterprise – or the deflating moment when we realise that our expectations cannot be met.
While we are waiting for that moment, I think there is plenty for us to do by putting LLMs to work in relatively mundane contexts. What are they good for? There’s a clue in the name: Large Language Models are good at language, something which traditional computing has been notoriously bad at for most of its existence.
Three sentences that I say too often - and will keep on saying
The longer I spend in leadership roles, the more often I find myself saying the same things over and over again. I expect that part of this is due to intellectual laziness – it’s easier to recycle the same thoughts than to have new thoughts. But part of it is because, over the years, I have found leadership principles that work for me, and words which express them concisely.
There are three things in particular which I say a lot, which my team sometimes tells me that I say too much. None of them are original – they are all ideas which I have learnt from others. They are . . .